Sunday, February 12, 2006

Weather Report

Hard to wake up completely with all this snow about (more than Maru's getting, for a change). I'm very grateful I have the car back; commuting tomorrow would have been difficult without it, particularly the morning walk to the bus. As it is, the snow's supposed to stop before day's end so I think the area should be plowed enough to make careful car commuting okay by the morning. And thanks to having the car we were able to do most of our errands yesterday, and cover the vehicle in plenty of time to protect it from the storm, so no worries.

I can now spend time bitching about how NBC doesn't see fit to run Olympic events in real time on weekend mornings, how all their affiliated channels are busy with infomercials instead, and Italy just six hours ahead of us. You'd think they'd want higher Sunday morning ratings with captive audiences eager to see stuff that only comes around once every four years.

The main local NBC station has a good excuse, they're covering the blizzard pretty thoroughly - a good thing, considering The Weather Channel is apparently too busy with fluffy fill-in reports on Mardi Gras preparations to actually cover a major Nor'easter blizzard as it's happening - but even that has its drawbacks. For every "how is Emily Hughes going to get to the Olympics now that The Media-Anointed One Michelle Kwan has finally realized she's not up to it?" report there's one where the only local stringer who hasn't bitched about being out in the storm and wanting to go back inside the news van has an impromptu conversation with some idiot who wandered into the picture only to find out he just happens to be selling "Blizzard of Aught-6" caps, whereupon she takes one from him and puts it on her head and says "Well, there you have it, now it's official!" This is, by the way, a very New York City thing, that a local weather event or disaster becomes Official the moment it can be exploited and sold to you on a piece of clothing.

So I'm going back to bed until such time as NBC deigns to bring us the prerecorded Olympics featuring more of their anointed American darlings, half of whom aren't even making it out of qualifying rounds and the other half of whom aren't worth rooting for because of their overblown sense of American entitlement and provincialism. As Rob noted, you look at the faces of the silver and bronze medal winners from other countries and they're obviously thrilled, where even gold medalists from the US seem somehow surly. It's as though the "Olympic ideal" of acknowledging that it's an honor just to be there and compete only counts if you have absolutely no chance of winning anything and can be turned into a heartwarming human interest story. Ah, but I'm still a sucker for the thrill of international competition, and I live in hope that some lower-profile US atheletes believe in the ideal even if their media doesn't, so blogging should be pretty light the next couple weeks whilst I'm deep in Olympic territory...